Paying Paul Pogba

Nothing in sports really surprises me anymore. It seems that just about anything and everything has been done, achieved, reached, seen, witnessed, experienced, and lived. Players play and fans watch – on and off the field. It’s been this way ever since we started piling in seats to surround a bunch of players play their respective sports for a few hours at time. We work 40, 50, 60, 70, even 80 hours a week to earn a wage that we then, in turn, throw down to watch players who will make our yearly salary with one kick of a football.  So, it seems that over the course of history, we’ve seen it all. Thusly, nothing really surprises us. We’ve come to expect that the ridiculous is now the norm. Millions of dollars mean nothing to us because we aren’t earning it. As long as they provide us with some entertainment for 9 months out of the year, it’s all worth it.

We watch and read about players signing contracts that put enough cash in the their pockets to finance small revolutions or enough money to wipe out the debt in some third world countries.  This holds especially true in football and it’s gotten exponentially worse over the last ten years. That is ever apparent in the love/hate relationship we have with the magical thing we call the transfer window. Speculation all summer and winter as to whom is going where. Who is leaving? Who is staying? But most importantly – how much is it going to cost? What people conveniently overlook is not just what it’s going to cost us now, but what it’s going to cost us (or other teams) in the future. I’m not just talking about monetary cost, either.

We’ve become accustomed to expecting that clubs will fork over mountains of cash that make absolutely no rational sense other than “well, we need ______________ in our squad.” We pay for entertainment and I understand that, so I get that clubs will shell out loads of money on an investment looking at future returns. How high clubs are willing to go is directly correlated to how deep their pockets are. But, the reality of it is that cash is splashed, values are inflated, and then players are overpaid and overvalued. I’ve never condoned spending frivolous amounts of cash and I’ve especially never condoned the spending of that kind of money on players who haven’t proven themselves to their club, or even to their sport. This leads me to our fill-in-the-blank – Paul Pogba.

First off, this lad has played fewer games than I could count on one hand and is rumored to be asking for $45k/week. If it were up to me, that’s not going to happen. Putting aside the fact that Ravel Morrison was a nutter, he had also not proved himself to the club yet, so I’d feel the same way about him asking for $45k/week. Then you have Danny Welbeck on the flipside who’s making a reported $15k/week, producing, and not demanding more money than he’s earned. Look at it this way – if I just started a job and before working a single day I asked my boss for a raise, he’d think I was out of my mind. And rightfully so. You don’t get raises based on what you’re going to do. You get raises based on what you’ve done. It’s as simple as that.

Second, United has never been about overpaying for players, especially youth players. Sure, we’ve had our flops, but that’s going to happen with every club, just some clubs more than others. The difference is that we’ve bought players based on what we thought was a fair value and we ended up being wrong. Other clubs have thrown money at players who weren’t ever worth that amount of money, and they knew it (Milner, Barry, Carroll, Downing, Torres, Arshavin, etc). Our mistakes were in thinking that players would be worth the money we paid (Bebe, Veron, Anderson). In this case, Pogba has done nothing to warrant making $45k/week. We’ve heard that it will cost more to replace him than paying him that weekly wage or that he will be worth it. The fact of the matter is that, you can’t throw that kind of money at someone just cause you’re worried that you’d have to replace him if/when he starts playing. That’s basically paying someone to stay put, and I don’t support it. He needs to put in some first team performances to prove to us that he won’t be the next Bebe or Anderson.

Lastly, throw together everything I’ve mentioned above, mix in an agent, and you’ve got total anarchy in the world of football. Who knows exactly what Pogba is thinking or feeling. Actually, you don’t need to know what he’s thinking because his agent, who is on Twitter, is apparently tweeting on behalf of the player. If I were Pogba, I’d put the kibosh on that. If he wants to come out and state his demands/thoughts/plans, then do so, but having your agent speaking on your behalf is counterproductive to the cause. Agents work for themselves and what’s going to get them the most money. We’ve seen it a million times, most recently with someone like Tevez. The agenda of agents mixed with greedy players are what’s behind paying exorbitant fees/wages for players like Milner, Garry, Carroll, Downing, Torres, Arshavin, and Tevez. It’s a volatile mix that’s giving unproven players like Pogba the gusto to think they can ask for that kind of money.

At the end of the day, asking for more of anything – especially money – should be predicated upon what’s happened before you ask for it, not what’s going to happen after. I don’t care if you’re 55 or 35 or 25 or 18. When you’re asking for $45k/week (that’s close to what I make in one year), you should have a body of work to support it. When it comes down to it, Pogba doesn’t. He’s not a proven player that we’ve picked up from another team. He’s a reserve player with a blank resume up until this point. He’s basically played zero first team matches and he’s not even 19 yet. I just don’t think that we should have to throw that kind of money at him for him to stay with us. I do hope he stays, puts in the effort that a 19 year old should, and shows us what the hype is really all about. And then when he sits down with SAF/United management to ask for a raise, he’ll have earned it. Until then, he simply hasn’t.

On Twitter at @JasTheDevil

The Morrison Obituaries

We all fancy ourselves armchair managers or voyeurs who can predict a line-up or substitution or a transfer. We sit at home, pint in hand, and we figure that we know what’s best for our club. And a few weeks ago when the rumor mill was churning about the end of the transfer window and who would/wouldn’t be leaving their clubs, all of our eyes shifted to the rumors about our Ravel Morrison. The enigmatic player who had only made 3 League Cup appearances was suddenly the talk of the United Kingdom. The buzz about this player was a mix of the good and the bad. The best academy player since Scholes mixed with the attitude of someone like Balotelli. In his limited appearances for the club, he had become a cult legend. If he made the bench, Twitter exploded. If he made it on the pitch, Twitter imploded. The only thing that was for certain was that all Reds wanted him to come through the ranks and live up to the billing he brought with him. As of January 31^st, that door closed with the closing of the transfer window.

In the article "Morrison vs. Morrison" I wrote two weeks before the window closed, I wrote down what I felt would most likely happen. On 1/31, those hunches, and fears, were realized when he left for West Ham. People took to the Internet to vent their frustrations that we couldn’t hold on to him or to lambast him for wanting to leave. As much as it hurts to see such a talent leave our club, the one thing people shouldn’t be is surprised. His exit was in the making years ago. I was never sure how bright his star would shine, but I always feared it wouldn’t be brightest in Manchester. Morrison is a tabloid’s wet dream. I’ve been to Manchester, and as lovely as it is, the city isn’t big enough for our club and for Morrison. It was a showdown in the vein of the OK Corral. When the dust settled, there was really only one outcome and it was Morrison riding off into the sunset, destined for a life outside the city of Manchester.

People speculated where he’d go. People speculated what the fee would be. People speculated as to whether it would be a loan or a permanent deal. First, people were sure he was going to Italy. Then people were sure he’d be loaned out. People thought he might end up at City. Then we read that he was headed for the Championship on a permanent deal. Cue a wave. What I will say is that I’ve never been fickle on my thoughts about Morrison. You can see them in my articles. You can see them in my tweets. If he didn’t want to be here, then I didn’t want him here. It was that simple. I refuse to believe that you can fundamentally change who someone is. As promising as this talent was, it just wasn’t meant to be and that really shouldn’t be a shock to anyone.

The UK is a place where nothing is off-limits in the press and tabloids. So, it was really a match made in heaven. The bad boy from up north comes riding into London, baggage in tow. No doubt we’ll read about Morrison getting into an early morning fight in a bar with the hooligans on Green Street. No doubt we’ll read about a row he’s gonna have with Big Sam. No doubt we’ll read about some (and watch some) lovely goals at West Ham. The kid has raw talent, there’s no denying that. But the kid also has some raw emotions and manners. That equation never yields truly predictable results. In the end, I feel that he just wasn’t destined for United. Seems he is destined for the newspapers.

Follow me on Twitter at @JasTheDevil